The longstanding impasse over US beef imports to Taiwan was an issue addressed in plenty of US diplomatic cables regarding bilateral relationships released by WikiLeaks, with the subject being termed by a top US official on Taiwan as “the highest priority for the White House.”
Several cables originating from the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) and the US embassy in Seoul suggested that whether Taiwan fully opens up its market to US beef as the US demanded did not only affect the US and Taiwan.
In a cable dated April 1, 2008, the AIT said that AIT Chairman Raymond Burghardt had suggested to then-vice president-elect Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) that president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) “should clear this issue from the agenda so that the US and Taiwan could devote the time to more substantive issues at the beginning of Ma’s first term.”
“The beef question is the highest priority for the White House, Burghardt stressed, adding that an agreement with Taiwan would also help pave the way for [the US’] market access in South Korea,” the cable said.
Burghardt said then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had told him he wanted to fulfill his pledge to open up Taiwan’s beef market, but had no power or right to act in a “caretaker” role unless the Ma administration made clear it did not object, the cable said.
The cable then said that “Siew promised to discuss with Ma the possibility of giving incumbent Chen Shui-bian the go-ahead to open Taiwan’s market to all US beef products before Chen leaves office. Siew said he hoped the US would allow a Ma visit to Washington before his May 20 inauguration, which, he argued, would provide Ma more leverage with China in future cross-strait negotiations.”
Taiwan did not allow US bone-in beef — a ban which had been in place since 2003 when the country outlawed all US beef imports shortly after the first case of mad cow disease was discovered — until a Ma administration protocol with the US in October 2009.
That protocol did not resolve the dispute after the legislature amended the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) to ban imports of beef offal and ground beef and the government began testing US beef for ractopamine in January, both hindering the resumption of bilateral talks under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, which had been suspended since 2007 because of the controversy.
An AIT cable dated Feb. 24 last year showed that US Representative James Sensenbrenner urged Ma at a meeting on Feb. 17 “to repair the damage done by its failure to implement [the] protocol opening the market fully to US beef imports.”
Sensenbrenner said that Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) told him at lunch on Feb. 21 that “the revision to the law [Act] could be reviewed as ‘early’ as 2015, or 10 years after the last known discovery of a BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)-infected animal in the United States.”
“Allowing the problem to fester for 5 years was unlikely to be well--received in Congress,” Sensenbrenner was quoted as saying.
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